"Drugs and the Demise of the Rice Diet"
During his career at Duke,
Dr. Kempner treated more than 18,000 patients with his rice diet,
which was originally designed as a treatment
for kidney failure and out-of-control high blood pressure
at a time when those diagnoses were like a death sentence.
Patients who at that time would have died in all other hospitals
had a reasonable chance of survival
if they came under Kempner's care.
The results were so dramatic that many experienced physicians
suspected him of falsifying data,
because he was reversing terminal diseases with rice and fruit,
diseases understood to be incurable
by the best of modern medicine at the time.
Intensive investigations into his clinic vindicated his work,
which other researchers were then able to replicate.
Kempner was criticized for his lack of controls,
meaning that when patients came to him
he didn’t randomly allocate half to his rice treatment
and put the other half on conventional therapy
to see which group did better.
Kempner argued that the patients each acted as their own controls.
For example, here’s a patient before the rice diet.
The medical profession threw everything they had at him,
and his blood pressures were still as high as 220 over 160,
whereas normal is considered more like around 120 over 80,
which is where the rice diet took him.
Had he not been given the rice diet,
it’s true his pressures might have been even lower:
zero over zero,
because he’d likely be dead.
The “control group” in Kempner’s day
had a survival expectancy estimated at 6 months.
To randomize patients to conventional care
would be to randomize them to their deaths.
One can compare those who stuck to the diet though
to those who didn’t.
Here’s a chart, showing the survival of
70 of the sickest of the sick that showed up at their clinic.
Of those that started the rice diet
but then stopped it within a year,
5 lived and 19 ended up dead.
For those who made it a year but then gave up on the diet,
instead of an 80% chance of dying
they had more like a 50/50, a flip of the coin.
But of those that stuck with the program,
90% lived to tell the tale.
Beginning in the 1950's, drugs became available
that effectively reduced blood pressure and hypertension,
leading to a decreased demand for the rice diet.
What conclusions can we draw
from this all-but-forgotten therapy for hypertension?
Not only was it the first effective therapy for high blood pressure,
it may be equal to or more effective than our current multi-drug treatments.
This causes one to speculate on the current practice
of placing patients on one drug, then another, perhaps a third,
until the blood pressure is controlled,
with lip-service advocacy of a moderate reduction
in dietary sodium, fat, and protein intake,
while the impressive effectiveness of the rice–fruit diet,
which is able to quickly stop the leakage from our arteries,
and lower increased intracranial pressure, reduce heart size,
reverse the ECG changes, reverse heart failure, reduce weight,
and markedly improve diabetes is ignored!
So should we return to the Kempner protocol
of starting with the most effective therapy,
saving drugs for patients who fail to respond,
or who are unable or unwilling to restrict their diet?
Look, today many people follow a vegetarian diet as a choice,
which is similar to what Kempner was often able to transition people to.
After their high blood pressure was cured by the rice diet,
patients were often able to gradually transition to a
less strenuous dietary regime without adding medications
and with no return of the elevated blood pressure.
So if the Kempner sequence of a strictest of a strict
plant-based diet to a more sane plant-based type diet
offers the quickest and best approach to effective therapy,
why isn’t it still in greater use?
The powerful role of the pharmaceutical industry
in steering medical care away from dietary treatment
to medications should be noted.
Who profits from dietary treatment?
Who provides the support for investigation,
and the funds for clinical trials?
There is more to overcome than just the patient's reluctance to change their diet.
What Kempner wrote to a patient in 1954
was as true then as it is now 60 years later.
Drugs can be very useful when properly employed
and used in conjunction with intensive dietary treatment.
However high blood pressure with all its possible complications
of heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, blindness
is still treated very casually,
a striking contrast to the attitude towards other diseases like cancer.
Since patients, physicians, and the chemical industry
prefer the taking, prescribing, and selling of drugs
to dietary treatment inconvenient to patient and physician,
and of no benefit to the pharmaceutical industry,
the mortality figures for these diseases will still remain rather appalling.
Despite hundreds of drugs on the market now,
high blood pressure remains the #1 cause of death and disability
in the world, killing off 9 million people a year,
and diet treats the underlying cause.
As Dr. Kempner explained to a patient,
look, if you should find a heap of manure on your living room floor,
I do not recommend that you go buy some air freshener and perfume.
I recommend that you get a bucket and a shovel
and a strong scrubbing brush.
Then, THEN, when your living room floor is clean again,
then fine, feel free to freshen things up
once the underlying cause has been removed.
As the great physician Maimonides said about 800 years ago,
any illness that can be treated by diet alone
should be treated by no other means.