Durk Pearson died recently. He was one of the pioneers of natural medicine — but really so much more than that, being a polymath.
Amongst Durk’s many endeavors; as a physicist, he developed guidance systems for cruise missiles; as a creative, he wrote screenplays for Clint Eastwood, such as “The Dead Pool”; as a longevity researcher, he kicked off the wellness revolution with his New York Times bestseller, “Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach,” and; as a freedom advocate, his case against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), won an appeal in the Supreme Court and brought by my colleague, now ANH-USA General Counsel, “FDA Dragon Slayer,” attorney Jonathan Emord, burst the doors open to a liberalized market for natural health products in which truthful structure/function claims could be made to inform consumer choice.
We ignore polymaths at our expense, and certainly the expense of future generations. Imagine if we’d ignored Aristotle, da Vinci or Turing? Or, in the East, if the Han Dynasty had ignored Zhang Heng?
Well, it’s now time to take heed of what Durk had been saying about medical freedom for over half a century. Durk said in an interview with Life Extension magazine back in 1998, “The price of liberty is vigilance.”
While often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, it seems this is more likely an abbreviation of a segment from a speech made by Irish orator and politician, John Curran, delivered in Dublin in July 1790, where he said, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”
Let me stray no further and move our attention to the issue we face today with efforts to centralize control over human health.
I can’t say it any other way: but this is stupidity. If I tried to be kinder, it would come out something like this: it is ignorant of the available facts, it is misguided, simple-minded, or lacking in judgment.
But, in my view, the adjective “stupid” does the job just fine — it’s short and to the point.
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