"Can Diabetic Retinopathy Be Reversed?"
Though many reported feeling better
on Dr. Kempner’s rice and fruit diet,
he refused to accept that as evidence of success.
He wanted objective measurements,
the most famous of which were his so-called eyegrounds photographs,
taken with a special camera that allowed one
to visualize the back of the eye.
And in doing so, he proved that
not only could diet arrest the bleeding,
oozing, and swelling you see in the back of the eye
in people with severe kidney, hypertensive, or heart disease,
but actually reverse it,
something never even thought possible.
Here’s the before;
here’s the after.
Reversal to such a degree that even patients who could
no longer distinguish any objects
have been able to read fine print,
a reversal of blindness with diet
The results were so dramatic
that the head of the department of ophthalmology at Duke,
where Kempner worked was questioned
as to whether they were somehow faked.
He assured them that they were not.
In fact, he wrote in one person’s chart,
“this patient's eyegrounds are improved
to an unbelievable degree.
Not only had he never seen anything like it,
he doesn’t even remember ever seeing a patient
with such advanced disease
even being alive 15 months later.”
The magnitude of the improvements
Kempner got were surprising,
reversal of end-stage heart and kidney failure,
simply beyond belief.
But as Kempner said as his closing sentence
of a presentation before the American College of Physicians,
"The important result is not that the change
in the course of the disease
has been achieved by the rice diet,
but that the course of the disease
can be changed, at all."
Now that we have high blood pressure drugs,
we see less hypertensive retinopathy,
but still a lot of diabetic retinopathy,
the leading cause of blindness in American adults.
Even with intensive diabetes treatment,
at least three insulin injections a day
with the best modern technology has to offer
like these implantable insulin pumps,
the best we can offer is usually
just a slowing of the progression of the disease,
so we can, in the 21st century,
slow down your blindness,
but a half century ago, Kempner proved
you could reverse it.
Kempner started out using his plant-based
ultra low sodium/fat/ cholesterol/protein
rice diet to reverse kidney and heart failure,
but assumed it would make diabetes worse.
He expected a 90% carbohydrate diet
would increase insulin requirements,
however the opposite proved to be true.
He just took the next 100 patients with diabetes
that walked through his door
that went on the rice diet for at least three months,
and their fasting blood sugars dropped
despite a drop in the amount insulin they were taking.
But this is what blew people away.
44 of the patients had diabetic retinopathy,
and in 30% of the cases their eyes improved.
From like this... to this.
That’s not supposed to happen!
Diabetic retinopathy had been considered
a sign of your irreversible destruction.
What does this mean in real life?
Unable to even read headlines, to normal vision.
The remarkable success Dr. Kempner had
reversing some of the most dreaded complications
of diabetes with his rice and fruit diet
was not because of weight loss.
The improvements occurred even in those patients
that did not lose significant weight,
so it must have been something
specific about the diet.
Maybe it was his total elimination of animal protein,
total elimination of animal fat,
total elimination of cholesterol,
or radical reduction in sodium, fat, and protein in general.
We don’t know, but how do we treat
diabetic retinopathy these days?
With steroids and other drugs injected
straight into your eyeballs.
And if that doesn’t work,
there’s pan-retinal laser photocoagulation,
in which laser burns are etched
over nearly your entire retina.
Surgeons literally burn out the back of your eye.
Why would they do that?
The theory is that by killing off
most of the retina,
the little piece you leave behind
may get more of the blood flow.
When I see this, along with Kempner’s work,
I can’t help but feel like
history has been reversed.
Like yeah, can you believe 50 years ago
the best we had was this barbaric
burn-out-your- socket surgery,
but thank goodness we've since learned
that though dietary means alone,
we can reverse the blindness.
But instead of learning, medicine seems to have forgotten.