Conventional doctors need more insight into nutritional medicine…

EDITOR—Nutrition has become a popular topic of public discussion, but the conventional medical community has largely been caught wearing no clothes. In his electronic response to Vickers and Zollman's article on nutritional medicine in the ABC of complementary medicine,1 Stargrove points out that somehow nutrition fell “out of the medical bag.” 1 2 Commercial health care simply grew with the industrial economy. Now we are experiencing waves of more loudly expressed alternative medicine, which recognises a fundamental centrality in nutrition.

It seems to me that this complex discussion is in many ways a cover story for an enormous, often unspoken, public discourse on religion, politics, personal identity, group process, and public and private angst or joy. The many issues addressed by the authors 1 unwrap briefly some of the pieces. But the authors do not seem to do more than read the names of the cities from the map. They do not address where we are trying to go or what we might achieve by trying to go there.

Nutritional insights, therapeutics, and protocols offer genuine healthcare benefits for literally millions of people who presently lack at least some portion of the wherewithal to achieve them. Vickers and Zollman's article seems unconcerned with this and is instead drawn to …