On the rocks

FOR a man who says he is not looking for a fight with medical orthodoxy, John Darrell doesn't pull any punches. There are, he concedes, some excellent GPs. That doesn't stop the Pickering-based natural health consultant weighing into them as a profession in his latest book, Eat Less Plastic, Drink More Rocks.

Lumbering dinosaurs, the 50-year-old calls them, before going on: "GPs have had it all their own way for long enough. In a short space of time they have degenerated from being guardians of common sense and wisdom in the community to shiny-suited sales reps for the pharmaceutical giants. It is time they were replaced by something that works."

He laughs it off when challenged, insisting that he's "not looking for a conflict at all" and that he likes to work with the orthodox medical profession when he can.

But the role of the family doctor does seem to have changed over the decades, he says. Whereas in the past your GP was a well-known member of the local community you felt you could talk to, and who would be able to advise you on a whole range of things affecting your health such as diet and lifestyle, today he or she is often little more than a scribbler of prescriptions.

The result? Orthodox medicine may be great at treating emergency cases, John says - but it's not very good at dealing with long-term chronic conditions or addressing the underlying causes of ill health.

"Doctors are eager to stick labels on you," he writes in Eat Less Plastic. "If you're feeling down, you are labelled 'depressive' and given addictive happy pills; if you've got aches and pains, you are given the label 'arthritis' and given powerful anti-inflammatory drugs (which can have disastrous side effects); if you are discharging excess gunk from your system through a skin rash, you get the label 'eczema' and are given hydrocortisone cream to send the discharge back inside again."

His disillusion with orthodox medicine dates back decades to when, as a teenager, he developed the crippling bone condition osteomyelitis in his legs. It's an inflammatory bone condition that causes a build-up of poisons that erupt into painful skin abscesses. John suffered for years - until he was 30, in fact. It left him crippled and scarcely able to walk, often relying on the help of callipers and sticks.

Treatment was periodic surgery to open the leg up and drain the poison, followed by painkillers and antibiotics. "It was the only treatment I had," he says. "So much of western medicine focuses on treating the symptoms. Doctors are not very good at telling you the cause of things."

The turning point came in 1983, when John was 30. He had suffered yet another flare-up, and overheard a doctor suggesting that his leg bone should be drilled out and replaced with stainless steel rods. Understandably, he wasn't thrilled at the idea.

He went in search of alternatives, stumbled across a book on Oriental folk medicine, and with his wife Stacey's help, started applying compresses to his leg. During the next 25 days, they steadily drew out the poison and pus - and he found that, miraculously, his leg became much stronger. Before long, he was able to walk almost normally, and has not had a flare-up since. "It was amazing: after 16 years," he says.

His story won him five minutes of fame in the glossy magazines of the day - and then he decided he wanted to find out more about the possibilities of natural healing.

He enrolled on a course in macrobiotics in London - and four years later, in 1993, left with a certificate from the London School of Macrobiotics and membership of the Macrobiotics Association of Great Britain.

Soon afterwards, he set up as a natural health consultant, and since moving to North Yorkshire with his family in 1998, has been practising first at the Kirbymoorside natural health centre and, more recently, at Pickering Memorial Hall.

Eat Less Plastic, Drink More Rocks may sound an odd title for a book: but it is essentially a plea for a return to a simpler, healthier diet than the over-processed, meat-and-dairy rich diet we gorge ourselves on today, with disastrous consequences for our health. Subtitled Common Sense Health Tips For An Insane World, it is essentially just that.

We don't literally eat plastic, John says: but much of the food we do eat is so processed, packaged and refined that by the time it reaches our plate it has little more nutritional value than plastic or the cardboard box it came in.

If you don't believe him, he suggests a little test: buy a cheap, low fat spread, leave it on the kitchen windowsill in the sunlight for a month, and then take a look. Chances are, nothing will have happened to it - it won't be rancid or stinking. The reason, he says, is that nothing wants to eat it. "Insects, bacteria, nothing is interested - and neither should you be," he says.

What he means by drinking more rocks is that we need to up our mineral intake. He says many nutritionists concentrate on ramming home the message about vitamins.

But minerals are equally important - in fact, of the 90 or so nutriments essential for human health, 67 are minerals.

The problem is modern, intensive agribusiness has leached the minerals out of soil to levels never known before - and it is having serious consequences for our health, he says.

Shortage of minerals is linked to a huge range of health problems from osteoporosis to mental health. His solution is simple: a return to a healthy, balanced, varied diet similar to that enjoyed by our ancestors for centuries before the industrial revolution.

We should try to eat more fresh, local, organically-grown food (preferably from a small local grower that we know is using natural composting methods to restore the soil) and avoid highly- processed, denatured food - as well as substances which are known to leach minerals out of the body, such as sugar. He says it would also be great for our health if we returned to our daily diet some of the most mineral-rich plants known to mankind: seaweed. People everywhere across the globe have valued seaweed for millennia because of its rich mineral content, says John. "It's only in the past 70 years or so that these traditional foods have become neglected with the increase in factory processed 'convenience' foods.

"When you start using sea vegetables regularly in your diet, you will notice within a few weeks how the quality of your hair, skin and nails improves."

Finally, he recommends colloidal minerals - natural minerals extracted from shale deposits. "These minerals... are then suspended in a liquid medium so all you need do is drink a couple of small capfuls a day," he says.

Drink more rocks, in other words.

- John Darrell practises at the Pickering Memorial Hall. To make an appointment call him on 01751 472327. Drink Less Plastic, Eat More Rocks is published by Regeneration Publishing, price £7.95. It can be ordered from most good bookshops (ISBN number ISBN-0-9543281-0-8) or ordered from John himself for £8.95 (with £1 going towards postage and packing).

Updated: 09:15 Monday, March 17, 2003