This is no idle threat or promise, just a fact of present day life.

My initial awakening came when visiting a 95 year-old friend in the hospital for the first time in her life. I was appalled to find her naked and spread-eagled as two inept aids scrubbed at her frail skin while administering a sponge bath. I was wearing a sweater and still found it chilly. I cringed as my elderly friend groped for the covers and was scolded by her captors.

My friend’s 75-year-old daughter and I stood helplessly by as her mother whimpered in humility, pain and defeat. Only her mother’s husband had ever seen her mother’s adult body, the daughter later told me. How humiliating that the small intestinal problem for which she was hospitalized evolved into a death sentence after state-of-the-art treatment. And make no mistake. This was no charity case. The daughter had even hired a full time nurse to "assist" the regular hospital caretakers.

In another instance, my husband’s uncle had a growth he’d ignored for 25 years. On the death of a good friend, he decided to check it out. Once "treatment" began he was dead in 6 months. Cancer is a slow-growing disease. Many people harbor it for years without medical interventions, and die of other causes. But thousands upon thousands die every year in hospitals as a result of inept treatment or a hospital-acquired infection. We’ve seen so many good people go to premature graves.

We used to wonder if we might be next. That was before a life-threatening disease caused me to question the health care I’d learned as a Health Educator at a major metropolitan hospital. I’d seen people herded like cattle used for guinea pigs when training hospital interns. Thankfully I discovered a philosophy called Natural Hygiene (Science of Life) and immersed myself in learning the true cause of disease and how to avoid it. Eventually my VERY skeptical husband embraced it and we’ve since spent many years learning from its top proponents. Now we feel blessed to know the only time we’ll be in a hospital (barring an accident) is to visit some other poor soul who has yet to see the light.

The Hallelujah Diet is based on a similar philosophy. But how long ago was it that former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop issued his report that the majority of America’s diseases could be prevented or reversed by changing diets and lifestyles? His voice was effectively squelched by the meat, dairy and pharmaceutical lobbyists whose huge monetary donations determine how Congress will vote. As Mad Cow Disease expert Howard Lyman points out, "…The main issue that concerns EVERY politician is unemployment: HIS!"

How sad it has come to this. That so many good people have had to die and are going to die, far sooner than necessary, because ignorance and greed dictate they will. Because the majority of what we wee, read, hear and learn about how to attain, retrieve or maintain health is often the very cause or promoter. And worse, in many cases the very people from whom we seek advice: medical doctors, dieticians and nutritionists, are victims and promoters, as well. They spent years getting an education on which to build a career. To question it would make a mockery of their commitment and threaten their livelihood. And many are already sick themselves. If not physically, then mentally, emotionally and/or spiritually. This makes it difficult to keep an open mind. To see that in the long run health, not money, is the only true wealth: for them, their loved ones, and their fellow beings.

And if all the high tech and medical knowledge available to humankind renders the world’s most affluent nation one of the highest in infant mortality, children with heart-disease risk factors before kindergarten, and premature deaths from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc., what good is it?

Most of these dedicated people seem unaware medical schools are supported by pharmaceutical companies with a vested interest in pathology, the study of disease, not prevention. They teach high tech surgery and drugs, not simple means of prevention or reversal merely by altering lifestyle and diet. Or that the people who provide health-food charts for doctors, schools, hospitals and restaurants are money, not health, oriented. And that "Nature’s most perfect food," the one whose deep-pocket-promoters dupe well-intentioned celebrities and athletes into donning milk mustaches, is linked to everything from juvenile diabetes to SIDS to learning disabilities, youth violence, allergies, breast and prostate cancer. (To name a few.)

Recent "incarcerations" of a beloved Aunt and Uncle and the premature death of a cousin, a former hospital administrator, caused me to question my role as an (albeit innocent) enabler. If we’re not part of the solution, we’re part of the problem. I no longer want to sit helplessly by watching loved ones become debilitated and embittered as modern medicine and surgery rob them of the joy of living along with their physical and mental faculties.

An 89 year-old friend recently told me: "I pray every morning as soon as I wake up that the Lord will let me keep my ‘remembrance.’" She’s seen too many of her friends become befuddled. In her mind (and mine) to be without "remembrance," a side effect of medication, would be the cruelest fate of all. I’m convinced this needn’t be. And I appeal to you to help me prove it: by establishing a pilot Vegan Health-Care Home using a variation of the Hallelujah Diet. As long as no drugs are administered and only the benefits of a vegan diet are promoted, a special license should not be necessary. People now pay a $1,000 a month (and more) to "warehouse" loved ones where they are numbed with medications until they wither away and die. If enough of us unite to initiate a Vegan Home, document the progress of its clients, and present them to the powers-that-be for verification, we can be instrumental in salvaging the lives of those who:

--Choose LIFE over a slow and painful death

--Wish to be ambulatory and sound of mind until their final day

--Wish to be able to contribute their wealth of knowledge and talent