I received some startling news the other day and now I’m bugged. “You’re going to just stand there and tell me that 90 percent of my body is made up of microbes?” I gasped.

News reports have pointed to the rising price of drugs as the major reason medical care costs people an arm and a leg these days. Medications used as directed are recognized as a leading cause of preventable death each year. The medical literature tells us that many current, standard drug protocols are linked to the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune disorders in our country.

A report out this week from the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimates that 1.5 million Americans are being injured each year as a result of prescribing mistakes related to medications. The errors are costing more than $3.5 billion each year. The report also suggests that 7000 people continue to die each year as a result of wrongly prescribed or errors related to medications.

The medical approach to health has come to dominate the field of primary health services in our country over the span of the last half-century or so. It goes like this. First, the doctor identifies and lists all the clinical signs and symptoms exhibited by the patient. Second, the resulting list is compared to named diseases and their lists of signs and symptoms. These are then matched up and the patient gets labeled with one or more diseases. Third, the doctor prescribes a treatment to cure the diagnosed disease. Almost universally, this consists of taking medication, due to the underlying philosophy of medicine. When you are ill, you take a pill.

Have you ever wondered who originally came up with the cruel idea of placing thirty children in a single school classroom day after day, week after week, with only one adult in charge? If you have observed a classroom in session, you know for certain that the majority of the children, particularly the boys, are just barely able to keep a lid on their natural instincts to leap out of their chairs and yell crazy stuff at the top of their lungs while hurling erasers, tennis shoes and apple cores at the girls.