***The Blank Slate Myth

Have you ever met people committed to the idea that babies arrive as blank slates. Beyond body parts, a lot of noise at one end and foul deeds at the other, babies, they believe, have nothing.

No personality. No talents. No will. No inbred likes or dislikes. Just pure nothingness, a blank slate.

Babies, all babies they believe, can be whatever you want them to be. You simply take the blank slate and fill it in as you choose.

Gregarious on command. Submissive by a different command. Behavior, IQ, world view (babies have a world view?), fashion sense–anything and everything parents desire–await only adequate training to make it happen.

Sadly, some people actually believe this. The blank-slate books they read whilst awaiting the blessed event gave them insights into babies’ “inside knowledge” that sound as solid as a rock, and so they set forth.

Constantly honing their techniques to get it right (a shadowy goal never to be reached), they make life miserable for both the baby and themselves. Parents get more and more frustrated, while kids learn that they don’t quite measure up just the way they are.

You have to wonder why these parents never catch on, surrounded as they are by huge mountains of evidence denying the “blank slate” theory,

In fact, the blank-slate theory of raising kids doesn’t work, has never worked and can’t work because reality doesn’t live there.

Just because a baby lacks speech has nothing to do with anything about what’s going on inside. Babies come chock-a-block full of opinions, information, preferences and feelings. Ignoring those things ends in failure.

And what, you may be asking, does the “blank slate theory” have to do with the endocrine system? With health in general? Medicine? Anything?

The medical industry views the human body–that would be us–as simple, blank slates. They don’t see any need to understand what’s going on in our innards because, in their view, it doesn’t matter all that much. The solution to every problem is bringing in pharmaceutical fire power to make our bodies conform to their standards.

In medicine, “blank slate” means one-size-fits-all–and that spells trouble. With a capital T, in big, red lights.

It’s bad enough they don’t know how our bodies work, but even worse, they don’t know that they don’t know, so they’re flying blind.

For one instance, medical schools teach the endocrine system as a separate, rather stand-alone system, when, in reality, it’s the center of the body’s universe, affecting everything that goes on. When it comes to the endo system, reality and medical understanding couldn’t be more opposite!

And they teach that an overactive immune system causes autoimmune system, but the reality is an autoimmune disease is but one result of a whacked immune system that needs help.

And don’t even get me started on that cholesterol business. Sheesh!

Since the body’s going to do what the body’s going to do no matter what we think, we need to plug into its reality and stop dropping drug bombs to force the body into submission.

And not just drugs. Diet bombs based on a lack of knowledge whack our health, too. For instance, the widely praised low-fat diet leads directly to disease. Not in the next five minutes, probably, but soon enough.

Combine all the ways medicine flies blind, and it’s amazing that any of us live long enough to vote, let alone collect Social Security.

The blank-slate theory of medicine doesn’t work, has never worked and can’t work because reality doesn’t live there.

Given that their basic premise is not based in reality, is it any wonder, then, that medicine is a leading cause of death–in any country you want to mention?

We need to know how our bodies work and how to help them work better. That’s what got me out of a very deep health ditch, and it works whenever it’s tried.

Knowledge is power.

God is good,

Bette Dowdell