Dear Doctor:

We must emphasize that we are medical anthropologists, and make no effort to treat people as patients. To the contrary, our philosophy is to provide people with information about the cultural causes of disease, so that they can perform certain lifestyle changes to see if it improves their health.

While our theories of disease causation are unconventional, we believe that our conclusions are soundly based on commonly understood and accepted principles of medicine. For many of you, depending on your training and specialty, you may have heard these theories before. For example, lymphologists would appreciate how easily the lymphatics can be blocked by compression, making clear the mechanism by which brassieres block the lymphatic drainage of the breast tissue which can lead to tissue edema, cysts, tissue hypoxia, and the accumulation of endogenous and exogenous toxins. It is this accumulation of toxins within the breast tissue that led us to hypothesize that bras might cause breast cancer. This simple mechanical theory is easily verifiable in the case of fibrocystic breast disease. Elimination of bra wearing is quickly followed within weeks, of not days, by reduced breast pain and cysts. 

We have other theories, such the effect of gravity on brain circulation and intracranial pressure, and how this relates to brain edema and various brain dysfunctions, including migraines, stroke, sleep apnea, seizures, Alzheimer’s, and more. To facilitate brain circulation, we suggest that people sleep with a slight head of bed elevation, e.g., Fowler’s position. We believe that our culture has taught us to sleep too flat, and in the wrong position, and altering sleep position has already been used to treat or prevent sleep apnea, SIDS, and stroke, and our research has shown it works for migraines, too. 

Ophthalmologists will appreciate how head position alters eye pressure, and that eye pressure is highest in the morning, after lying down. They would thus understand how sleeping too flat might lead to chronically elevated eye pressure, or glaucoma. Our hypothesis, then, is that head elevation could possibly prevent and be effective in treating glaucoma.

We have other theories, and like the above briefly mentioned, they are all based on simple physical and physiological principles. We believe in applying Ockham’s razor and seek the simplest answer to the cause of disease. Of course, we realize that we do not have all the answers, and that the complexity of reality makes for many exceptions to any theory. However, our Self Study approach enables people to safely test for themselves whether simple lifestyle changes can improve their health.

We believe that all of our work is preliminary. We need the medical profession to take up the issues we have raised and perform the needed follow-up research. 

Some of the issues, however, require a special devotion to research that overrides cultural resistance to consider certain causes of disease. Every culture is blind to its own idiosyncrasies. Bra wearing is a good example. From the point of view of an anthropologist, bra wearing constitutes breast binding, and is as bizarre a form of human behavior as Chinese foot binding. For Western physicians living in this bra wearing culture, the use of a bra is a cultural given. Its very unquestioned nature may have contributed to the oversight of not considering the constrictive effect of bras on breasts and how this could lead to breast disease.

We are sometimes oblivious to the obvious, particularly when we are so used to seeing things a certain way. Many specialists are so used to considering a disease from one paradigm that an alternative paradigm is resisted as considered ridiculous. This closed-minded attitude has, we believe, inhibited the needed follow-up studies required to confirm our hypotheses, such as the link between breast cancer and bras. 

We hope you will have an open mind when you review our website and our books. We think you will find them a refreshing new way to look at old, unresolved medical mysteries. And we hope you encourage patients to use our website and perform a Self Study. It may help them when the cause of disease is unknown.

We would also like to thank those of you who already have a link to our site.