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Whatever your opinions regarding
the efficacy of various dietary regimes for cancer – Gerson, Macrobiotics,
Vries – you are obliged to stand up and take due notice when a woman,
diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer and given two months to live, survives
and indeed flourishes and blossoms back to full health by following the
Macrobiotic philosophical and dietary regime, taught and supervised by
expert Michio Kushi himself.
This heart-rending story of Mina Dobic is not
an entirely easy one to read. She literally takes you back to her birth
and early years in Communist Yugoslavia led by Tito. I found somewhat
cruel her account of her repressive life with her parents, especially
her father, who didn’t want to contribute financially towards her
education. I also could barely relate to her life under the Communist
regime, where one of her greatest youthful achievements was organising
a birthday ceremony to Marshall Tito! This woman is barely 10 years older
than I am, yet reading this sounded more like the life of my now deceased
grandparents who emigrated to Canada from Kiev, Russia in 1919!
What was hardest to read was her downward slide
into ill health – asthma, migraines, allergies, nephritis, haemorrhoids,
vertigo – and her appallingly brutal treatment by the doctors at
the hospital where she was finally diagnosed with cancer. I found myself
crying uncontrollably, reading about the callousness with which the doctors
didn’t do anything to relieve her pain, except basically to tell
her to shut up and stop complaining. The doctors didn’t tell her
about her diagnosis, either – this she discovered upon opening the
envelope with her file, upon being transferred to another hospital. Mina
had been a popular, very successful broadcast journalist, and when she
threatened to expose the sadistic Consultant over the airwaves, they arranged
her ticket to a better environment.
However, once ensconced in an oncology ward with
other women cancer sufferers undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, she
decided to forego this brutal treatment. A doctor friend gave her a copy
of The Cancer Prevention Diet by Michio Kushi, which inspired her to heal
herself with Macrobiotics.
We then follow Mina, her husband Bosko and her
two lovely young children on their emotionally and spiritually uplifting
quest to learn, practise, cook and live macrobiotically in a country where
macrobiotics was virtually unknown. Mina’s friends and relatives
raised some $8,000 in order to send her to the Kushi Institute near Boston
USA for 3 days, where they learned the basics of macrobiotic cooking and
had a private consultation with Michio Kushi himself. This trip occurred
soon following Mina’s self-release from hospital, when she was exceedingly
ill and weak and she had to use some 30 nappies per day to cope with her
copious vaginal discharges following her surgery. Her recovery is movingly
told, not sparing us her tremendous physical obstacles, from bleeding
and exceedingly painful hemmorhoids, to losing about 60 pounds where she
looked a virtual skeletal bag of bones. She was totally convinced that
the foods she had been eating – meat, dairy products, and sweets
and fats – had been significant contributory factors to her ill health.
She was also utterly in tune with the macrobiotic philosophy of balance
of yin and yang, of eating only the finest quality organic foods to build
her blood or “chi” and strengthen her digestion and immune system.
Mina’s medicinal basic macrobiotic diet
consisted of 50% whole grains, 25-45% vegetables, 5% protein, 5% seaweed,
miso soup daily, 2% pickles and one half cup of cooked fruit every 10
days. She also used a variety of medicinal macrobiotic remedies, including
pickled umeboshi plum, ume-Sho-kuzu drink, carrot/daikon drink, azuki
bean and black soybean tea, used to promote discharges, and regulate and
strengthen Mina’s extremely toxic body. Mina not only got better,
but eventually became a macrobiotic counsellor, ambassador and a representative
of the Kushi Institute at the First Annual Whole World Health Forum. Unable
to return to her native country due to the Bosnian conflict, her family
settled in the USA where they are very happy and healthy today, helping
many other ill people.
As regular readers of Positive Health are aware,
there is a yawning gulf between the macrobiotic diet and other diets using
juices and raw food, just as there is between Ayurvedic and Chinese Medicine
compared with Naturopathy. It is evident however, that each regime, practised
within its own philosophical system, appears to work for many people.
That Mina was sentenced to death with Stage IV ovarian cancer, and recovered
and became cancer-free after one year of macrobiotic diet and her strong
belief in its healing powers is beyond argument.
This book is a must read!
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